Twentieth-Century Satire: From Modernism to Television
How the upheavals of the twentieth century transformed satirical writing and produced new forms of comic political critique
By Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D. — satire.info
The twentieth century subjected satire to tests that previous centuries had not contemplated: totalitarianism (which suppressed satirical expression on a scale and with an efficiency that historical autocracies had never achieved), two world wars (which made comic exaggeration compete with a reality that exceeded satirical imagination), and the rise of mass media (which created new venues and new audiences for satirical content while transforming its relationship to political power). The satire that survived and flourished in these conditions did so by finding forms capable of absorbing what seemed, for much of the century, like inherently unsatirizable material.
Waugh, Orwell, and the British Novel of the 1930s
The 1930s produced the two satirical novelists who most powerfully shaped the subsequent British tradition. Evelyn Waugh’s satirical fiction (Decline and Fall, 1928; Vile Bodies, 1930; Scoop, 1938) anatomized English class society, colonial ventures, and the popular press with a precision and comic ruthlessness that reflects Waugh’s fundamentally Juvenalian attitude: the world was not going to improve, and the appropriate response was the comedy of despair. George Orwell’s satirical writing operated from a contrary impulse: his Juvenalian anger was in the service of a Horatian hope, the belief that exposing the mechanisms of oppression could contribute to changing them. Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) together constitute the most influential body of political satirical fiction of the century.
The Television Revolution: The Satire Boom and Beyond
Television transformed British satirical culture in the 1960s. That Was The Week That Was (1962-63) introduced live political satire to a mass television audience, establishing a tradition that continues in Have I Got News For You, Yes Minister, The Thick of It, and dozens of subsequent programs. The American equivalent — from Saturday Night Live through The Daily Show to Last Week Tonight — developed later but achieved a comparable cultural impact.
The century’s most technically innovative satirical television was produced by Chris Morris: Brass Eye and The Day Today represented a species of deadpan satire so comprehensive, so precisely mimicking the formal conventions of television journalism, that they constituted what might be called an internal critique of the medium — satire that used television’s own formal vocabulary to expose television’s own formal pretensions. This meta-satirical dimension — satire that is simultaneously satire of its own form — became increasingly characteristic of the most ambitious satirical work of the late century and beyond. Twentieth-century satire’s full history is documented in extensive academic literature across literary and media studies.
Source: satire.info | BBC Satire History
